The case of the traveling armchair

MANILA, Philippines - If there were silent witnesses to the saga that happens inside classrooms, I’d say few would surpass the power of armchairs. Armchairs are a big part of a student’s life. It’s where cheating notes were secretly coded in the most inconspicuous of places; it’s where goo and gum on its underside stick and stain an unsuspecting students’ skirt or pants; it’s where liquid paper art takes graphic and text form.

In the aftermath of supertyphoon Yolanda that damaged structures in the Visayas region, several groups around the world responded to help.

The group that I am now volunteering with, Care Caravan, is one of those which committed to help by rebuilding schools in provinces affected by the calamity. The group looked around their own backyards and saw old armchairs in a local school in Quezon City.

“We started to negotiate with the principal of Grace Christian College if the chairs could be refurbished to benefit those who are beginning to pick up the pieces from where the tragedy left them,” recalls Leslie Sun, co-founder of the three-year-old group which focuses on disaster relief and outreach.

Soon, two containers of Moreta Shipping were loaded not just with relief packs but with 450 armchairs, paint, brushes, nails, and hardware to get the repairs going, and delivered to Pontevedra Christian School in Capiz. With the completion of the school renovations, the students got color-coded armchairs.

I wasn’t yet a volunteer for Care Caravan when the armchair turnover happened last year. So when I recently learned that the school bodega where Care Caravan got the armchairs was from Grace Christian College (Grace Christian High School then), it was very amusing to imagine that perhaps one of the school chairs I once sat and took notes on in the 13 years from Nursery up to High School I spent there had travelled hundreds of kilometers south and is now blessing another student.

It’s awesome just seeing how things come together in such a decade-long timeline. In an instant, I was reminded about how I had not valued my school armchair. I remembered even how a teacher caught me vandalizing my table with a correction pen in an attempt to edit someone’s else work for a misspelling.

“After rebuilding the school and donating the armchairs to the school, we saw that they only had five working computers,” fellow volunteer Francis Chu shared.

This prompted Care Caravan to work in collaboration with the owners of Iloilo Internet Café to repair and donate second-hand computers. With support from private individuals and local companies, the project has donated 25 and will hopefully receive up to 45 units to at least fill up one computer laboratory.

The donation reminds me that my computer has been with me for the past six years through graduate school. I would pound on it, eat snacks on it, and even carry it around without a case. If it were that easy, I would have thrown it away for a better one.

But what I’ve recently learned about the travelling armchair made me think how I should value seemingly old, worn-out things, knowing that it may someday go to someone to whom it would be worth much more.

(Jacqueline Ong volunteers for Care Caravan, a social outreach program of Chinese Christians in the Philippines. Email her at [email protected].)